Dr. Eric McDonald, research professor, and his group of DRI scientists recently traveled to Aberdeen, Maryland to assist in a scientific-based field training course with personnel from the U.S. Army Military Academy at West Point. McDonald and colleagues have partnered with West Point to help develop a curriculum designed to teach cadets how to take soil samples and make measurements with the use of different geotechnical equipment, as well as manage large data sets.

“We are collaborating on the highest academic level in the Department of Defense by working with West Point,” McDonald said. West Point is highly regarded as the world’s premier leader development institution. It is a real honor for us to work with the Cadets and their military officers and instructors at Academy. The DRI team selects the sites and develops a study plan so that cadets learn to gather data from the field, which then DRI uses in reports for the military.

Mr. Steve Bacon, assistant research geomorphologist, DRI, helped to plan the study and assisted cadets with how to properly operate field equipment to gather data.

“The cadets learn how to strategize and work as a team in the field while also developing the skills they need for Bachelor of Science degrees in environmental engineering, geography or geospatial information science,” Bacon said. “It was fascinating to observe the cadets work in their teams. You could already see who was demonstrating leadership skills.”

The cadets are also accompanied by a civil engineering instructor who holds the rank of major and who also evaluates the performance of the cadets as part of their academic credit for the field course.

This year McDonald did something special, he took the students on a historical and geological field trip to the Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania. There he arranged for a retired colonel who served in Special Forces during the Vietnam War and now a National Park Tour Guide to show the cadets around the battlefield.

“It’s not often that you get to study a battlefield’s topography and analyze what factor the terrain played in the outcome of a battle,” McDonald added. The geology and associated terrain were a primary factor that helped the Union Army win the battle of Gettysburg as well as contributed to the horrific number of causalities suffered by both the Union and Confederate armies.

McDonald and his team from DRI said the collaboration is rewarding and it provides a great service and opportunity for researchers to work with the Army in a different role.

“Usually we are in the advisory role, providing data and research to the Department of Defense, however in this case, it’s an academic partnership.”

Since the beginning of the collaborative project in 2007, the missions included: map data and terrestrial imagery acquisition and soil data collections at the U.S. Army’s Fort Greely in Alaska, Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, military test and training sites in Panama and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

Eric McDonald, Steve Bacon and West Point cadets.